Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

RallyPoint Wants To Be LinkedIn For The Military

Until recently, an army telecommunications officer like Richard Becker wouldn’t have had a lot of options for figuring out where his next posting would be. At the moment Becker, who has been in the service for 10 years, is attending Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. After his 11-month stint there, he and his family will need to move. But where?

According to military protocol, Becker must call a central human resources command office that handles all of the army’s telecommunications officers and have a conversation about options. He could talk to a branch manager who might offer some more specific information. Becker could say he wanted to go to Hawaii or to Fort Gordon, Ga., but it would be up to the army’s HR office to tell him what his choices were. “Often the army’s requirements will trump my preferences,” Becker says. Besides, his capacity to seek out options would be limited. He could try asking friends on FacebookFacebook or LinkedInLinkedIn for advice, but his network would be limited to his existing friends and contacts.

Now Becker has a whole new universe of possibilities. RallyPoint, a startup launched last Veteran’s Day by two army vets, is like LinkedIn on steroids for members of the military. The most stunning thing about the site is its extensive graphic organizational chart that shows almost every location around the world where members of the U.S. military are working, from large, well-known bases like Fort Bragg, N.C, to tiny outposts like Lajez Air Base in the Azores Islands. At each of those locations, it shows how many people have Becker’s rank and qualifications.

On the Hawaiian island of Oahu alone, there are 17 different spots Becker might consider working. It’s highly unlikely his HR officer would tell him about all the options. Now, through RallyPoint, Becker can explore each of those potential destinations by connecting online with people who work there and asking them about their experiences and whether his skills would be a good fit. He can also make inquiries about personnel shifts and get a sense of whether a job might open up within a few months of when he might need it. Each RallyPoint profile shows the length of time a person is assigned to a position, so Becker can get a sense of upcoming personnel changes without even making contact with another soldier.

As my readers know, I am highly skeptical about most pitches I get from job search websites who want me to write about their fancy new technology that promises to find employment for the legions of desperate job seekers. But after spending a couple of days exploring RallyPoint, I’m convinced it’s an extraordinarily powerful new tool for active service members and, as of this month, for veterans looking for civilian work. Though it’s still in startup mode, operating on $1.5 million in venture funding and $110,000 in prize money it received last October as one of the four winners of the Mass Challenge startup accelerator competition in Boston, I think it has big potential to grow and dominate the military niche, giving powerful new tools to active service members who will be able to control more about their destiny.

This week it opened the site up to veterans and to 15 pilot companies looking to hire vets, including Amazon, BloombergBloomberg, General ElectricGeneral Electric, DuPont, Lockheed-Martin and printer maker Lexmark. Aside from the obvious benefits to job-seeking vets, the fact that people on active duty and reservists are now all on the network offers an advantage to service members who are getting prepared to enter the civilian world.

For people who have been in the military for their entire professional career, it can be difficult to imagine a job that would be a good fit for their skills. Example: George May, who had been a junior rifleman in the army, is now a sales team leader at Bloomberg. A current rifleman can look at May’s profile and understand that he can transition to that role. RallyPoint users can also search for terms like “finance” and “New York City,” and then link with vets who have jobs there. “There’s no book out there that tells you what you can do if you carry a rifle for a living and you don’ t have a college degree,” says RallyPoint co-founder and CEO Yinon Weiss. “With Bloomberg and other companies on RallyPoint, it turns their veterans into brand ambassadors.”

RallyPoint also has a promising revenue model that could handsomely reward its co-founders, Weiss, 35, and Aaron Kletzing, 29. The two have interesting back stories. Born in Israel, Weiss grew up in Palo Alto, Calif. and went to U.C. Berkeley, where he figured he would become an engineer like his father and older brother. But he saw a marine officer flyer and decided to meet with a recruiter. He wound up serving 10 years in the military, including two tours in Iraq. One one of them he met Kletzing, a West Point graduate who served five years. After getting out of the service, the two both went to Harvard Business School, where they reunited and Kletzing got the idea for RallyPoint.

They started the business as a class project for Kletzing (Weiss had already graduated) and soon realized it had the potential to be an enormous boon for members of the service and for veterans looking for work. They also believe it can make money by selling advertising to companies who want to target veterans, like colleges and certificate programs and brands like Camelback and Oakley that see vets as their customers, or moving companies that can approach people who are getting ready to leave the service; they expect to start running ads by year’s end. Companies looking to hire vets would also pay RallyPoint for the right to do targeted searches, the way companies pay LinkedIn for that privilege. Though the potential user base for RallyPoint is tiny compared to LinkedIn’s 225 million members, it’s sizable for a niche site. Along with the military’s 2.2 million active members and reservists, there are some 21.5 million veterans. So far, 30,000 have signed up.

To me, the site’s most impressive feature is its vast organizational chart that makes it possible for current service members to reach across the military complex and see where they might be stationed, and then either make connections or keep up contact with people who have served with them. The other compelling feature is the bond that members of the military feel for one another, which runs deeper than many of the connections we feel in civilian life. I imagine that veterans and service people who connect with one another on RallyPoint are more likely to go out of their way to help one another than many of us who casually link on Facebook and LinkedIn. “Trust is a huge piece of this,” says retired Admiral John Harvey, who served 39 years and is now one of RallyPoint’s advisors. The site “makes it possible to stay connected to the people who devoted their lives to the same cause I did.”

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It’s a good assumption of FB’s current usage numbers probably includes everyone they have ever acquired an email address with which to solicit membership. We know the numbers of supposed members, but no one knows whether they actually use FB or not. What we do know is that almost no one goes to FB to make a purchase. It’s a social media myth that a significant number of people consult their FG – FFBs to make a serious purchase. Thus FB still has no basis for significant monetization – unlike say Google or Amazon.

To understand LNKD’s eve greater problem for growth which necessarily requires – user satisfaction, I suggest you try to reach a member of the LNKD decision making management to resolve a usage problem. LNKD management have placed themselves in a comfortable vacuum away from user problem distractions. This seems to be the new internet business paradigm. Like many internet companies LNKD expects not to provide any real personal service, relying on its software and users to sort things out so they don’t have to spend the time or money managing the problems that ironically their lack of management skills create. Any LNKD stock holder or potential buyer should careful review how LNKD management addresses user problems to maintain user satisfaction.

God help us – LNKD for the military? I bet our enemies everywhere are rubbing their hands together gleefully.

LNKD may have had an interesting past, but today it is under attack from within. Going unnoticed in the press is a growing rebellion of dissatisfied users within – which is beginning to erode membership and LNKD stock value. One dissatisfied user has said LNKD management has over 3000 complaints regarding you users are being abused and censored by group owners – which LNKD is enabling by not providing mediation for dissatisfied users. Take a read here and you can see the tip of the iceberg: http://community.linkedin.com/questions/1882/why-the-comments-submissions-sharing-groups-and-al.html#answer-46621

A very clever idea that fills a unique capability deficiency for US servicemen. 2.2 potential users is nothing to sneeze at. Someone should do the same for Canadian Forces – a much smaller model but still commercially viable.

I think you should do more home work, RallyPoint has no interest in members helping members find jobs. I posted open jobs that I knew of for other vets who were looking for work, and they blocked my account. So saying they want to be the linked In for military not even close. They want to present their favored companies jobs which are mostly low level labor jobs that they want to get the military just out of the service because they usually don’t know what their skills are really worth. so to say they want to help members find jobs is false, and second you can never get the people that run the site to respond to requests for help. last they have my personal information on their site and since I am blocked I do not have the ability to take it off. I get an average of 20 people a week trying to connect and I can’t even get word to them that the owners of the site will not allow it. These people that run / own this site have their own hidden agenda and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone Military or Vets.